Known in the art is a trainer for welders, which comprises an electric spark oscillator, a welding torch, and a model of a workpiece. This trainer can be used to teach the welder to strike an arc and maintain a specific arc gap, as well as to train in feeding the filling wire to the arc zone (cf., for example, E. G. Uglov, A. A. Gribov, Trainer for Teaching Welders in Manual Argon-Arc Welding, Svarotchnoe Proizvodstvo, 1974, No. 7, p. 47).
This trainer is deficient in that the welding situation is simulated poorly and inadequately. No real welding arc is provided, and the level of training of welders is comparatively low.
Also known in the art a trainer for welders, which comprises an electric spark generator and an electrode simulator equipped with a holder and a drive to simulate the electrode melting during welding. A thin sheet of conventional or electrographic paper is placed on the workpiece and the path of the electrode tip is traced thereon by the spark discharge. The trainer also comprises a pulse counter whose readings can be used to examine how many times the arc gap between the electrode and workpiece was interrupted or increased in excess of the specific length (cg., for exmaple, V. P. Lugin, V. A. Kuzmichev, Trainer for Teaching Welders, Svarochnoe Proizvodstvo, 1977, No. 9, pp. 50-51).
This trainer is deficient in that it can only be used to train welders in a limited assortment of welding processes. The training quality is low because no comprehensive monitoring is provided to control the manipulations of the welder trainee.
The closest prior art is a trainer for teaching welders basic skills of manual electric-arc welding, which comprises an electrode holder, a welding power source, an electric converter of the welding arc into sounds of different pitch, and a headset with earphones coupled to the welding circuit. In this trainer, welders are taught by means of a real electric-arc welding process where real electrodes and workpieces are used. But, any simulator of the welding electrode can be used instead of the electrode holder with the real electrode. Real workpieces can be replaced by a unit simulating the welding object, which can be made, for example, as a plate or a pipe, or some other similar object (c.f., for example, USSR Inventor's Certificate No. 5,569,908, published in "Otkrytiya, Izobreteniya, Promyshlennye Obraztsy, Tovarnye Znaki" No. 7, 1977, Inventors: A. A. Vasiliev, V. A. Kuznetsov, R. A. Smirnov).
This trainer makes use of a feedback audible signal which is produced by the converter for the trainee.
Disadvantages of this trainer consist in that high-quality and effective training of welders cannot be achieved because no objective criteria to assess the quality of the real arc process are available for the trainee.
Moreover, this trainer, as a teaching facility, is not functionally versatile. This makes the training process much longer and can even result in development of false perceptual motor skills in the process of training.